News: Hawken sold to Reloaded Games
If you're wondering what happened to Hawken, well Adhesive Games and their publisher Meteor sold the game in a bankruptcy sale to Reloaded Games. This is the same Reloaded...

Following the success of Armored Core Reprises, the internal From Software band called FreQuency (as headed by Kota Hoshino) will be doing another Armored Core remix album. Called Sunrise, the first track to be premiered is that of “Vanishing” (as shown below). Released as a physical copy at the end of the week in Japan and then digitally next week, it’s clear that we’ll be seeing and hearing more of FreQuency in the future. There’s also an excellent fan made Armored Core tribute album called The Answer if you’re at all curious.

So the much loved Blodia from Cyberbots will be getting a rather lovely looking toy, from Sentinel’s increasingly amazing Riobot line. We’ve covered this before but now we have some very nice pictures of the toy in question. As an aside, Sentinel’s Tumblr is worth bookmarking too. Despite the different player colours, which is a nice touch, the paint scheme on the figure looks very nice indeed and it also appears that the toy will have some manner of diecast (this being a good thing obviously). Still no word on a release date or price but it’s nice to know that Sentinel haven’t forgotten about the Blodia.

There’s currently some interesting stuff going on at the Tamashii Nations Akiba Showroom, as we have the release of Battle Robot Damashii around the corner. Apart from showing all manner of new toys, with the lovely Robot Damashii RX-105 Xi Gundam above being notable, the really cool stuff is the AR elements of the exhibit. For this you need an iOS device and this app. Seeing Ideon pop into existence looks to be pretty cool. AmiAmi has a nice update on all this too.

As was hinted at a while back, the mighty RX-105 Xi Gundam will indeed be getting the Robot Damashii treatment. Pre-orders start today and it is also a Bandai premium online shop purchase. Coming in at 10,500 yen it’s probably one of the most expensive Robot Damashii toys yet made. There is good reason for this though, the toy is utterly huge. It’s being done to scale with the other Gundam mobile suits and at 26m in the original novels, that practically dwarfs the original RX-78-2 Gundam (that’s just a meagre 18m). To put this into perspective, the mobile armor PMX-000 Messala from Zeta Gundam has a lower head height (23m) than the Xi Gundam. There are some nice comparison shots of the new toy too and it shows the scale difference off very nicely. Apart from the height, this will also be part of the Ka Signature splinter brand. So it’s going to have Hajime Katoki handle the the modelling and finish. The Xi Gundam was also recently added to Gundam Extreme Versus Full Boost as well as a DLC pack for the current Gundam Extreme Versus. In any case, it’s one of our favourite Moriki Yasuhiro designs so we’ll be getting this for sure.

In a slightly weird move, Bandai will be releasing a toy of a mecha called GunGreat Nations which in turn may apparently be a boss in the upcoming Battle Robot Damashii. Utilising parts of Bandai’s Tamashii logo, it also seems to be a design intended to be emblematic of Bandai’s toy mecha dominion. If we’re honest we think it looks bloody ugly but it is at least a lot better than this Disney monstrosity Bandai have concocted. Oh to have that as a boss in the game, then at least we could cleave its disgusting figure in twain with a well placed aura sword strike. No word on a price or release date for the above GunGreat Nations toy, nor which toyline it will be part of.

As the new Super Robot Chogokin Gurren Lagann hits the shelves in Japan, Bandai have announced a limited edition Anti Gurren Lagann to be released in June for 6,000 yen. This was a special boss unit that appeared towards the end of Saisei-hen (shown in a video below), so this is yet again another unique progeny from the Super Robot Wars saga (much like our beloved Final Dancouga). Whilst this does indeed look lovely, it will only be available for purchase in Japan through Bandai’s premium online store.

In two new videos and an interview, all manner of new things have been revealed regarding the upcoming Battle Robot Damashii. The first point of note is that Artdink are handling the game’s development, this is a good thing and does sort of mark them as the go to mecha tie-in studio to go to after From Software dropped the ball with Another Century’s Episode R. The second point is that the game will feature Ideon as a playable unit. This is quite simply fucking mental. It’s also interesting to point out that whilst the name of the game cites the Robot Damashii toyline, the game will in fact feature other toylines too (as Ideon only has a Soul of Chogokin to speak of in modern toy terms). Finally, you’ll also see a familiar sight from Armored Core V in the videos below. This very much warmed our heart. There’s also a lot of Dunbine and L-Gaim love going on here as well, that’s something we’re obviously happy to see.

There are two new promos for the soon to be released Gunhound EX over at 4Gamer. This being the PSP update to the PC sidescrolling shooter co-developed by G.Rev and Dracue. Whilst the game was meant to be released late last year, it was delayed to fix a critical bug. The new promos show more gameplay as well that of the soundtrack, the latter being noteworthy as it was penned by the lovely (and very talented) Kinuyo Yamashita. You can pre-order the standard (boxed) game here, though this will also be made available on Japanese PSN when it’s released too.

In the mad rush towards the end of last year, we neglected to mention that the excellent Carnage Heart EXA had been picked up by Natsume for a digital release in the West via PSN. No details on when this will happen (except “early 2013″) or how much it will cost but this is still resoundingly good news. Especially as EXA was received very well in Japan when it was released back in 2010 and it’s just nice to see Artdink’s classic mecha series still trundling on.

Whilst it’s been a tad quiet on the Battle Robot Damashii front, we now have a new trailer (shown below). Almost entirely gameplay footage it looks like a cross between From Software’s Another Century’s Episode Portable and a slew of Artdink’s Macross and Gundam games. As we suspected, the mecha haven’t retained their anime scales but have instead been treated in the same way the Robot Damashii toys have. In addition, the footage primarily shows a lot of quite rigid melee combat. To be fair this is more likely down to the editing, as the Gundam Extreme Versus trailers offer suffer the same fate (maybe Bamco should get another trailer guy?). Finally, the trailer hints that a lot more shows will be included along with the ones that have already been announced. Let the guessing games begin!